Suddenly one of them, biting down hard on a peanut, has an inspiration. He leaps to his feet exultant, palpitating like a crusader shinning up the walls of Antioch. How, now, comrade, have you bitten into a worm? Nay, gents, I have thought of a good one, a swell one, the damndest you ever heard tell of. Why not put everyone to work? Why not shovel it out in a really Large Way? Why higgle and temporize? We won’t be here forever, and when we are gone we’ll be gone a long while.
But the Führer? Wasn’t he babbling again, only the other day, of balancing the budget? Isn’t it a fact that he shows some sign of wobbling of late—that the flop of the NRA has given him to think? Well, we can only try. We have fetched him before, and maybe we can fetch him again. So the train reaches Washington, the porter gets his tip from the taxpayer’s pocket, and the next day the four brethren meet to figure out the details. But they never get further than a few scratches, for the Führer is in one of his intuitive moods, and his Christian Science smile is in high gear. Say no more, Harry, it is done! The next morning the money begins to gush and billow out of the Treasury. Six months later a billion is gone, and plans are under way to collar five times as much more.
Such is government by the Brain Trust. Such is the fate of the taxpayer under a Planned Economy. Such is the Utopia of damned fools. I have been careful to take the evidence from unimpeachable sources. If it had come from the Congressional Record I’d have been suspicious of it, for both Houses, as we heard lately from the Führer himself, are full of liars. But the Nation and the New Republic always tell the precise truth, and in the precise sense that it is defined by all idealistic men. Both were howling for a Planned Economy long before the Führer himself ever heard of it, and both hailed the setting up of the Brain Trust as a step forward in government comparable to the Northern Securities decision or the emancipation of the slaves.
Well, then, who is this Hopkins who had that facile inspiration on the train, and made off with that billion so swiftly and so light-heartedly, and is now preparing to get rid of $4,800,000,000 more? I turn to the Nation and the New Republic again: the former printed a monograph on him on May 22, and the latter on April 10. He is, it appears, the son of an honest harness-maker in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1910 or there-about he was graduated from a fresh-water college in his native wilds, and made tracks for New York. In a little while he had a nice job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and then, in 1918, he got a nicer one with the Board of Child Welfare. By 1922 he was beginning to be known as a promising uplifter, and in that year the Red Cross made him its divisional manager and wikinski at New Orleans. In 1924 he was back in New York to take a better job with the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, and a few years later he fell into a still better one as director of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. Here he shined so effulgently that when, in 1932, the Führer, then Governor of New York, set up a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, good Harry was made its director at $12,500 a year. His translation to Washington followed naturally. When he arrived there, according to the New Republic’s biographer, he was “received uproariously by the Administration’s left wing, and within three months was a national figure.”
Of such sort are the wizards who now run the country. Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people’s money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse—always at someone else’s expense, and usually at the texpayer’s. He has been going it over and over again at Washington. And now, with $4,800,000,000 of vour money and mine in his hands, he is preparing to save fresh multitudes, that they may be fat and optimistic on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, 1936, and so mark their ballots in the right box.
About his associates in this benign work for humanity I can tell you less, for the Nation and the New Republic have failed, so far, to print treatises on them, and “Who’s Who in America” is silent about them. “Who’s Who” is so hospitable that no less than 31,081 head of Americans, male and female, qualify for its present edition. They include all sorts of one-book authors, third-rate clergymen, superannuated Chautauqua lecturers, and neighborhood busybodies, but a diligent search fails to reveal the Hon. Messrs. Jacob Baker, Aubrey Williams and Corrington Gill. There is an Ezra Baker who is chairman of the Bunker Hill Monument Association and was formerly chairman of the Boston Licensing Board, and a Rev. George Randolph Baker who is associate secretary of the Board of Education of the Northern Baptist Convention, but the ineffable Jacob is non est. Among the Williamses there is an Anita who is a professional uplifter down in sunny Tennessee and refuses coyly to give the date of her birth, and a Charles B. who is professor of Greek and ethics at Union “University” in the same great State, and an Edward L. F. who is a lecturer in Summer schools, a Rotarian and the editor of the Kadelphian Review of Tiffin, Ohio, but I can’t find the genius, Aubrey. Finally, there are eight Gills, including one who wrote “Forest Facts for Schools” and another who is an Elk, a Knight of Pythias and a Woodman of the World, but nowhere in the book is there any mention of that inspired young man, Corrington.
Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise—a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine. This is the Führer’s inspired substitute for constitutional government and common sense.
1 Grecia? Cf. Daniel VIII, 21.
2 Mark XVI, 17.
1 Born in St. Paul, Minn., in 1885; appointed a Federal district judge, 1939. An Elk and a Catholic.
2 In September, October and November, 1931, I had printed in the American Mercury three articles inquiring into the relative degree of civilization of the forty-eight States, supported by 106 tables of statistics. I found that Mississippi, on almost all accounts, was entitled to “the lamentable preëminence of the Worst American State.”
3 Born in 1872; Senator, 1919–47; died 1947.
4 Born in 1859; Senator, 1911–23; died 1934.
5 In his youth a professional baseball player; later a varnish manufacturer. Born 1886; died 1940.
6 Born 1859; Senator from Montana, 1913–33; died 1933.
7 Shouse had been chairman of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee from 1929 until July 1, 1932. Raskob had been chairman of the whole committee during the AI Smith campaign of 1928 and until succeeded by James A. Farley in 1932.
8 Born 1876; died 1936.
9 Ritchie was very popular at the convention, and was the second choice for the Presidential nomination of more than half the delegates. But AI Smith bungled the Stop Roosevelt movement so badly that by the time it came to a vote there was no second choice.
10 This was written in the early morning, after the historic session adjourned. Next day Roosevelt was nominated—and promptly swallowed the wet wet plank, though he had pulled against it. I found Bishop Cannon during the day. He was sitting lugubriously in an upstairs corridor of the Congress Hotel, and told me that the sudden collapse of Prohibition had been a great surprise to him. While we palavered a photographer came along and made a picture of us, head to head. When it was printed it made a painful impression upon the bosses of the Anti-Saloon League, for to them I was one of Beelzebub’s agents. But the bishop was too despondent to care.
XXIV. CRITICISM
The Critical Process
From FOOTNOTE ON CRITICISM, PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES,
1922, pp. 85–104.
First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, Dec., 1921, p. 25
NEARLY all the discussions of criticism that I am acquainted with start off
with a false assumption, to wit, that the primary motive of the critic, the impulse which makes a critic of him instead of, say, a politician or a stockbroker, is pedagogical—that he writes because he is possessed by a passion to advance the enlightenment, to put down error and wrong, to disseminate some specific doctrine: psychological, epistemological, historical, or esthetic. But this is true, it seems to me, only of bad critics, and its degree of truth increases in direct ratio to their badness. The motive of the critic who is really worth reading—the only critic of whom, indeed, it may be said truthfully that it is at all possible to read him, save as an act of mental penitence—is something quite different. That motive is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world.
When, years ago, I devoted myself diligently to critical pieces upon the writings of Theodore Dreiser, I found that practically everyone who took any notice of my proceedings at all fell into either one of two assumptions about my underlying purpose: (a) that I had a fanatical devotion to Mr. Dreiser’s ideas and desired to propagate them, or (b) that I was an ardent patriot, and yearned to lift up American literature. Both assumptions were false. I had, in fact, very little interest in many of Mr. Dreiser’s main ideas; when we met we usually quarreled about them. And I was and am wholly devoid of public spirit, and haven’t the least lust to improve American literature; if it ever came to what I regard as perfection my job would be gone. What, then, was my motive in writing about Mr. Dreiser so copiously? My motive, well known to Mr. Dreiser himself and to everyone else who knew me as intimately as he did, was simply and solely to sort out and give coherence to the ideas of Mr. Mencken, and to put them into suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song into the dense fog that blanketed the Republic.
The critic’s choice of criticism rather than of what is called creative writing is chiefly a matter of temperament, with accidents of education and environment to help. The feelings that happen to be dominant in him at the moment the scribbling frenzy seizes him are feelings inspired, not directly by life itself, but by books, pictures, music, sculpture, architecture, religion, philosophy—in brief, by some other man’s feelings about life. They are thus, in a sense, second-hand, and it is no wonder that creative artists so easily fall into the theory that they are also second-rate. Perhaps they usually are. If, indeed, the critic continues on this plane—if he lacks the intellectual agility and enterprise needed to make the leap from the work of art to the vast and mysterious complex of phenomena behind it—then they always are, and he remains no more than a fugleman or policeman to his betters. But if anything resembling a genuine artist is concealed within him—if his feelings are in any sense profound and original, and his capacity for self-expression above the average of educated men—then he moves inevitably from the work of art to life itself, and begins to take on a dignity that he formerly lacked.
It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men. Did Goethe, or Carlyle, or Matthew Arnold, or Sainte-Beuve, or Macaulay, or even, to come down a few pegs, Lewes, or Lowell, or Hazlitt? Certainly not. The thing that becomes most obvious about the writings of all such men, once they are examined carefully, is that the critic is always being swallowed up by the creative artist—that what starts out as the review of a book, or a play, or other work of art, usually develops very quickly into an independent essay upon the theme of that work of art, or upon some theme that it suggests—in a word, that it becomes a fresh work of art, and only indirectly related to the one that suggested it. This fact, indeed, is so plain that it scarcely needs statement. What the pedagogues always object to in, for example, the Quarterly reviewers is that they forgot the books they were supposed to review, and wrote long papers—often, in fact, small books—expounding ideas suggested (or not suggested) by the books under review. But every critic who is worth reading falls inevitably into the same habit. He cannot stick to his ostensible task: what is before him is always infinitely less interesting to him than what is within him. If he is genuinely first-rate—if what is within him stands the test of type, and wins an audience, and produces the reactions that every artist craves—then he usually ends by abandoning the criticism of specific works of art altogether, and setting up shop as a merchant in general ideas, i.e., as an artist working in the materials of life itself.
Mere reviewing, however conscientiously and competently it is done, is plainly a much inferior business. Like writing poetry, it is chiefly a function of intellectual immaturity. The young literatus just out of the university, having as yet no capacity for grappling with the fundamental mysteries of existence, is put to writing reviews of books, or plays, or music, or painting. Very often he does it pretty well; it is, in fact, not hard to do well, for even decayed pedagogues often do it. But if he continues to do it, whether well or ill, it is a sign to all the world that his growth ceased when they made him artium baccalaureus. Gradually he becomes, whether in or out of the academic grove, a professor, which is to say, a man devoted to diluting and retailing the ideas of his superiors—not an artist, not even a bad artist, but almost the antithesis of an artist. He is learned, he is sober, he is painstaking and accurate—but he is as hollow as a jug. Nothing is in him save the ghostly echoes of other men’s thoughts and feelings. If he were a genuine artist he would have thoughts and feelings of his own, and the impulse to give them objective form would be irresistible. An artist can no more withstand that impulse than a politician can withstand the temptations of a job. There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. His difference from other men lies precisely in the superior vigor of his impulse to self-expression, not in the superior beauty and loftiness of his ideas. Other men, in point of fact, often have the same ideas, or perhaps even loftier ones, but they are able to suppress them, usually on grounds of decorum, and so they escape being artists, and are respected by right-thinking persons, and die with money in the bank, and are forgotten in two weeks.
Obviously, the critic whose performance we are commonly called upon to investigate is a man standing somewhere along the path leading from the beginning that I have described to the goal. He has got beyond being a mere cataloguer and valuer of other men’s ideas, but he has not yet become an autonomous artist—he is not yet ready to challenge attention with his own ideas alone. But it is plain that his motion, in so far as he is moving at all, must be in the direction of that autonomy, that is, unless one imagines him sliding backward into senile infantilism—a spectacle not unknown to literary pathology, but too pathetic to be discussed here. Bear this motion in mind, and the true nature of his aims and purposes becomes clear; more, the incurable falsity of the aims and purposes usually credited to him becomes equally clear. He is not actually trying to perform an impossible act of arctic justice upon the artist whose work gives him a text. He is not trying with mathematical passion to find out exactly what was in that artist’s mind at the moment of creation, and to display it precisely and in an ecstasy of appreciation. He is not trying to bring the work discussed into accord with some transient theory of esthetics, or ethics, or truth, or to determine its degree of departure from that theory. He is not trying to lift up the fine arts, or to defend democracy against sense, or to promote happiness at the domestic hearth, or to convert sophomores into right-thinkers, or to serve God. He is not trying to fit a group of novel phenomena into the orderly process of history. He is not even trying to discharge the catalytic office that I myself, in a romantic moment, once sought to force upon him. 1 He is, first and last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying
to arrest and challenge a sufficient body of readers, to make them pay attention to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to provoke them into an agreeable (or shocked) awareness of him, and he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis attained which Wagner achieved when he wrote “Die Walküre,” and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg.
Joseph Conrad was moved by that necessity to write romances; Mozart was moved to write music; poets are moved to write poetry; critics are moved to write criticism. The form is nothing; the only important thing is the motive power, and it is the same in all cases. It is the pressing yearning of nearly every man who has actual ideas in him to empty them upon the world, to hammer them into plausible and ingratiating shapes, to compel the attention and respect of his equals, to lord it over his inferiors. So seen, the critic becomes a far more transparent and agreeable fellow than ever he was in the discourses of the psychologists who sought to make him a mere appraiser in an intellectual customs house, a gauger in a distillery of the spirit, a just and infallible judge upon the cosmic bench. Such offices, in point of fact, never fit him. He always bulges over their confines. When he is thus labeled and estimated, it inevitably turns out that the critic under examination is a very bad one, or no critic at all.
But when he is thought of, not as pedagogue, but as artist, then he begins to take on reality, and, what is more, dignity. Carlyle was surely no just and infallible judge; on the contrary, he was full of prejudices, biles, naïvetés, humors. Yet he is read, consulted, attended to. Macaulay was unfair, inaccurate, fanciful, lyrical—yet his essays live. Arnold had his faults too, and so did Sainte-Beuve, and so did Goethe, and so did many another of that line—and yet they are remembered today, and all the learned and conscientious critics of their time, laboriously concerned with the precise intent of the artists under review, and passionately determined to set it forth with god-like care and to relate it exactly to this or that great stream of ideas—all these pedants are forgotten. What saved Carlyle, Macaulay and company is as plain as day. They were first-rate artists. They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 49